A man with one leg remains a biped, just as he also remains a tetrapod.
Right. I was going to say the same thing. All of my grandparents are dead but both of my parents are alive, and I don’t consider my parents to be orphans, and I highly doubt they would describe themselves as such.
I am with you on that. I have lost 2 children and my mother. Losing one’s parents is in the natural scheme of life. Losing one’s children is not. I am sure this person was not trying to be insensitive, but it did rub me the wrong way.
[quote=“Vaevictis, post:15, topic:563664”]
Mother and Father are quite universal, don’t you think?
not sure if there’s a name for it, but there is an idiom for it in Chinese - 白发人送黑发人. which basically means the old attending a funeral for the young.
Can I suggest that the reason this term does not exist is because of the “intermediate states”?
What I mean is:
With a widow there is a clear binary between spouse alive, spouse dead.
Then with orphanhood, you have one intermediate state; one parent alive, one has passed away. And we sort of have terms for this state (the remaining parent may call themselves a widow, the children might say they are in a single-parent family and mention that one parent has died if asked. I don’t know what sort of terms may have existed in the past).
But with losing children things get complicated.
If someone lost all their children but one they would not be able to use the term even though the circumstances of this could have been horrific. Then what about if a woman lost all her children but was also pregnant? What if a couple lose their children but they have a living grandchild that they then raise? What if a father loses all his children by one woman but there is at least a possibility of paternity elsewhere? etc etc
But orphanhood can also be an intermediate state, at least in Spanish and in my area.
Huérfano, huérfano del todo: orphaned of both parents.
Huérfano de padre: lost father, has mother.
Huérfano de madre: lost mother, has father.
Huérfano de hijo(s): has lost a child/children.
My grandmother will threaten with bodily assault anybody who says she had two daughters. She has two daughters, but she had three; she’s orphaned of both parents and of her first daughter. And she says it exactly like that (in Catalan, she doesn’t speak English and getting mad makes her forget her Spanish).
No word for it in Dutch. In fact, a popular Dutch writer recently remarked on the Dutch language not having that word.
Well exactly, and you can have terms for those specific states, as you listed. But there are too many states for the losing children case.
And I thought of another complicating factor: adoption. If a couple lose all of their biological children but have adopted children, they may well consider themselves foobar (where “foobar” is the word for parent-whose-children-have-all-died).
Then again, they may consider it grossly offensive to attach such a label to them because they have just as much love for their adopted children.
ISTM an orphan is identified as such because their plight needs to be identified or addressed, which also explains why adults aren’t usually called orphans. a widow is identified as the marital status of women seemed to have been an important issue in the past. whether they be maiden, married, widowed or horrors, a spinster. being a widow means you have a clear label that means you’re not a spinster. it must not have been quite the same for a man, hence the word ‘widower’ is derived from the female equivalent, rather than vice versa for most other gender nouns.
a parent who has lost a child is still a parent. other than identifying them as bereaved for the purposes of a funeral, what would be the purpose of labelling them as such? even the specific Chinese idiom used to describe losing a child is used to acknowledge the tragedy rather than the parents.
according to this article, http://blogs.jpost.com/content/word-losing-child, “sh’khol” (שכול) is the Hebrew word for this, and offers an explanation for its existence.
I don’t understand this reasoning at all.
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It is in fact generally NOT the natural state of human beings to lose 100% of their children. It used to be more common than it is now, but if in fact it were as normal an occurrence as you claim, the human race would likely not have survived to this point.
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We certainly have words for many things that are common. Being orphaned is just as common an occurrence as being bereft of one’s children, and we have a word for that. Being widowed is something that happens to almost everyone who doesn’t get divorced, and we have a word for that.
Ridiculous. The child mortality rate in 1912 was not 51% anywhere on the planet, and it is not 51% anywhere today. The absolute worst of the worst African countries have child mortality rates in the vicinity of 20%.
There has never been a point at any time in the existence of the English language in an English-speaking country when “most children died,” much less in 1912.
Not Roman, but there’s a passage in Plato’s Republic, book V, in which Socrates seems to suggest that in order to make sure the Guardian class would be strong, weak infants were to be killed: “the children of the inferior guardians, and any defective offspring of the others, will be quietly and secretly disposed of”. I believe but am not certain that this reflects Spartan custom; as for Plato, there is no consensus on whether he was serious about the scheme he has Socrates suggest in The Republic, or whether it is an elaborate satyre that is meant to show what happens when you take ideology and philosophy too far.
How appropriate that athread baout dead children comes back as a zombie. 
I have no idea why you directed this comment at me. At no stage have i ever claimed that human beings to lose 100% of their children.
I suspect that you do not understand the difference between “100% of human beings lose one of their children” and “100% human beings to lose 100% of their children”. I didn’t even claim the former, though it is closer to the truth. i certainly never lciamed the latter.
But those are words that refer to relationship and legal status. A child is somebody’s orphan and they gain legal status by virtue of that. A woman is somebody;s widow and she gains legal status by virtue of that. The words were coined to define the legal status of the people involved.
What possible legal status could someone gain from having lost a child?
What is ridiculous is that you apparently don’t understand what “child mortality” even means, yet you feel able to comment upon it.
“Child mortality” refers to deatsh of children between the ages of 12 months and 5 years. Nothing else. That is why your figures are so low.
In contrast, I was referring to the deaths of all people under the age of 18, ie the deaths of children. And yes, for almost all of human history most people died before they saw their 18th birthday. If you stop and think about it, it could not have been otherwise. With maternity rates in the vicinity of 4 children per woman, obviously the vast majority of people were not surviving to reproduce, otherwise the world would have been literally covered in humans. As with every other species, only two children of every woman actually survived to produce offspring. The other 4 died without leaving issue. Some of those four would have died in adulthood without reproducing, but most died without ever reaching adulthood, which is why the average lifespan was in the early 40s.
In case you need references:
"The Geneva Bourgeoisie (Henry 1956) show high child mortality, with aprobability of dying by age five close to 400 [in 1000]…the probability of dying by age five was only about200 per thousand live births, whereas in the market towns, the comparable figure exceeded 400 for some time periods. Overall, the series no doubt underestimates child mortality in England, since it excludes major towns.Hill
“In the 20th century, the world largely eradicated the diseases that used to mean most children died before growing up.”
Pearce
“an investigation of headstones in Laurel Hill Cemetery reveals most children died before their tenth birthday.”
Braley
“Foreign observers and Katehrine II herself noted thatin the villages most children died before they reached adulthood.”
Moss
“Until the late 19th century… Infant morality varied between a minimum of 25% of all live births and a maximum of more than 31%” [NB this is just deaths under 1 year of age]
Kytir
“in the 1850s in America [death in the first 12 months] was estimated to be 216.8 per 1,000 for whites and 340.0 for African Americans”
Wikipedia
None of this is particularly controversial or novel material. It’s accepted by demographers that prior to the first Industrial revolution and the contemporary Farming Revolution which allowed the population of Europe to explode, most people died before they reached adulthood and ~45% of people died before they reached the age of 10. The effects of the Revolutions came much later to the developing world, and mortality rates remained in the 50% range until the 20th century.
Uh huh. So how do you explain the fact that childhood mortality rates are in excess of 50% in an English speaking country right now?
Guess that isn’t happening, huh? :dubious:
That may be the case for you, a privileged woman living in an affluent nation in the 21st century. That has not been the case for the vast majority of women throughout the history of the world. For those women losing a child was just as natural as losing parents. A young woman was actually more likely to have lost children than to have lost a parent.
That isn’t the only one of its kind, nor even the best one for this discussion. The best one was one found in a pile of letters in a rubbish heap in England, which uses the same basic language, and then continues “if it is a boy keep it, if a girl discard it. By the way, those socks you sent me are really warm. Can you send me another couple of pairs” Literally, it’s that casual and included as a brief aside in a letter about the most mundane things that are clearly much more important.
The Romans simply did not view the death of a child as being at all horrifying or even cause for sadness in many cases. Once again, this doesn’t imply that they didn’t love the children they did want, but they certainly never viewed the deaths children as the utterly horrific experience that some people in this thread have suggested.
On a similar note, infanticide was so common in Rome there were actual laws passed to make it illegal to kill healthy males or firstborn females. The justification for the laws was that the population was not growing sufficiently rapidly. And those laws weren’t a satire, it was a serious problem caused by the common custom of killing unwanted children.
And we shouldn’t get the idea that these was unique to Rome. The number of dead babies found in the Thames and the back alleys of London in the 19th century was staggering. When people have a choice between killing a child and both them and the child starving to death. most seem to choose to kill the child.
Interesting, exactly on OP.
Also fortuitous, for us, that it appeared as recently as January 2012.
Perhaps because, as you noted, he’s using a different definition of childhood mortality than you are?
And it is not ridiculous to use the plain definitions of words rather than the special definition created by experts. I am aware of no culture that defines childhood so restrictively. If you’re going to use a term used differently in a specific field to people not in that field, it would further the fight against ignorance for you to define that term rather than assume people knew what you meant.
So when all the evidence says that >50% of people who were born died before they reached the age of 18, it is technical jargon to say that most children died?
:dubious:
But for most of humanity’s history, 18 was not the limit between childhood and adulthood. Losing a child who has had children is, for many people, not as bad as losing one who has not; the grandchild will care for you/inherit the property/etc. RickJay’s definition skews one way, yours skews the other.
There’s so much truth in this. I lost my parents when I was 49 and 60, and there is a real sense in which I will always feel orphaned. After my mother died, I told my partner “You’re the only person left to be proud of me.” Indeed, parenthood and childhood don’t end when you become an adult, even at times when the roles are reversed.
Yes. All things considered, I’m not surprised that there’s a Hebrew word for it. There should be a word for someone who has lost his entire family. It was common enough, in the wake of the Holocaust.
Damn, this is one of the saddest threads ever.